World-class performers have better brain integration according to new research. Whether athletes, musicians, executives, or scholars, some people just stand out. And research shows that their brains differ in specific ways from the rest of us. The key seems to be “brain integration.

Dr. Fred Travis has found a way to use EEG to measure brain integration. And high brain integration predicts high performance.

He and Dr Harald Harung from Oslo Metropolitan University studied top performers. They studied top Olympic athletes, professional orchestral musicians, and very successful executives.

These top performers had greater brain integration scores.

But What about Education?

You would think that world-class performance would follow things like education. And incentives, experience, and practice.

But research shows these factors can only account for a small fraction of success.

An integrated brain is the key, according to three studies by Drs. Harung and Travis.

So How to Develop Brain Integration?

Research by Dr Travis has found that Transcendental Meditation develops brain integration.

The diagram below shows the brain integration of world-class performers compared to those who are average.

Long-term TMers had almost double the brain integration of world-class performers. Wow!

Dr. Harung explained TM has specific effects not seen in other meditations.

In their short book World-Class Brain, Drs. Harung and Travis offer a readable intro to the brain. They overview their three studies. They show that brain integration also predicts greater moral behaviour. And a higher frequency of peak experiences.

Also that groups with greater brain integration can improve the function of organizations.

And it explains how an entire society benefits from developing individual brains. Amazing stuff!

World-Class Brain is available on Amazon (that’s not an affiliate link!). A bigger book by Drs Harung: Excellence Through Mind-Brain Development, is available from www.brainintegrationsystems.com.

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Vicki and I met him in 1981 in Johannesburg. A friend had set up a workshop from Tony called “Use Your Head.” She invited us to the session in Braamfontein because they were short of registrants! It was a freebie for us.

Tony was the leading authority on the brain who created the mind map technique. It has no peer for note-taking, creative thinking, presenting and much besides. He claims it has 250 million followers.

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The technique is like a Swiss army knife for the brain. As you well know, it encourages creative thinking and improves  memory.

Tony said he first noticed at school that some were intelligent – yet did not do well in traditional exams.

He first began to develop his ideas about memory and learning at the University of British Columbia. He was studying psychology, English and mathematics.  He noticed that the students who did well did not always have the neatest notes. In fact their notes tended to be messy and covered with doodles, scribbles and key words.

“The great thinkers, including Da Vinci and Montessori, always drew images and arrows and lines in their notes,” he said, according to The Herald of Scotland. “When I started using keyword notes, bigger letters, with colour and arrows, it allowed my brain to speak to myself with a lot less clutter. It was as if I’d been driving all my life with my windscreen caked in mud, and suddenly I could see clearly.”

After graduating from UBC in 1964, Buzan worked for a time as editor of the journal of Mensa, the high IQ society. A 1973 BBC series Use Your Head made him famous. He also published several books with the BBC which sold more than three million copies.

Tony was prolific- writing some 80 books in over 40 different languages.

He also established the World Memory Championships in 1991; the latest event will take place in Wuhan in China in December.

Speaking about his work, Buzan said his ideal was a world in which everybody was aware of their extraordinary potential. “And they use that for their own personal self development and to help others.”

His latest project was collaborating on Mind Maps for Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi’s new book Exam Warriors.

He had the greatest love of learning of anyone I ever met.

After the Braamfontein Use Your Head seminar we got to work with Tony and the Learning Methods Group. We gained new respect for ways to better ourselves – things like the importance of meditation, exercise, hobbies, music and culture.  We later set up Thinking Skills Training in SA. And then in Australia when my mom emigrated there.

I have now got great responsibilities in a non-profit organisation. But  sharing Tony’s gifts continues. Find out how to transform yourself here.

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Doreetha was 99!

She said she wanted to get her degree simply to better herself. It took her six years –  a testament to her will, determination, and commitment to learning, according to John Coleman writing in his new book, Passion and Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.

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YOU WILL EARN MORE MONEY

Recently, Tamborini, Kim, and Sakamoto found that, controlling for other factors, men and women can expect to earn $655,000 and $445,000 more, respectively, during their careers with a bachelor’s degree than with a high school degree. and Graduate degrees yield more.

YOU WILL LIVE LONGER

Reading can dramatically reduce your stress levels.  Coleman cites a  recent report in Neurology that learning activities can help delay Alzheimer symptoms, preserving people’s quality of life. Other research indicates that learning to play a new instrument can offset cognitive decline, and learning difficult new skills in older age is associated with improved memory.

I have been taking Hindi lessons. And am delighted to report it seems to open all sorts of brain pathways-so I can remember names better and just feel generally sharper. Guitar lessons are next!

And it is not surprising there is compelling research to support the idea that the better educated make better lifestyle choices and live longer.  David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney’s research suggests that a year of formal education could add more than half a year to your life span.

Perhaps Doreetha Daniels, at 99, knew something we may have missed.

YOU WILL BE BETTER LIKED

I admire those who are dedicated to learning and growth. I am certain you do too.

Have you ever sat in a quiet place and finished a great novel in one sitting? (By the way, I can teach you how)

Coleman asks if you remember the fulfillment you felt when you last settled into a difficult task — whether a math problem or a foreign language course — and found yourself making breakthrough progress? (I can help you here too!)

Have you ever worked with a team of friends or colleagues to master difficult material or create something new?

These experiences can be electrifying, and that is the kind of feedback from graduates of my Thinking Skills over the years.

There are many reasons to continue learning. I hope this article has given you some added inspiration.

As Coleman writes: “We live in an age of abundant opportunity for learning and development. Capturing that opportunity — maintaining our curiosity and intellectual humility — can be one of life’s most rewarding pursuits.

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If you want to get ahead of the curve you’re going to have to remember a lot of stuff – reading with a measure of retention and understanding!

Maybe you were never very successful at school– And maybe you’re not a good studier–most of us just got by at school. And you can’t help but feel you are doing this “studying thing” wrong?

If you have new specialist exams coming up you’re going to have to commit stuff to long term memory rather than cramming. So …

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And if you’ve never been really good at study you don’t even remember what you did.

As you read, a dozen related thoughts pop up. After packing away all those ideas, killing the process of the dumb ones and writing down the good ones, you don’t remember where you were on the page and have to start over. Or you will have continued to go through the motions of reading ahead for five paragraphs, realise this, and not have any comprehension or memory of what you read.

Paging through textbooks is a pain in the butt. But this graph will help you get that degree. It will certainly save you lots of time.

Before that, lets digress briefly. Loch Ness is a freshwater lake in Northern Scotland. The lake is about 23 miles long and perhaps half a mile wide. A drive from Inverness down the north-west side of the lake to the Drumnadrochit Hotel will take you about 20 minutes.

If you’d have stopped the car late one afternoon long ago – and looked southeast across the misty Loch towards Urquhart Castle, you may have been lucky enough to see Nessie the Loch Ness monster. Here’s a pic

Why she is important now is that she is going to help us to remember the shape of the graph of how your memory works during the process of learning.

MEMORY DURING LEARNING

You’ve heard about about short term memory and long term memory. We’re going to talk about memory in a different kind of way.

“Memory during” means what happens when you form your memories. Memory during is memory during learning, during workshops, during an hour of study, during a movie, during your life, during anything.

Its the process of forming the memory. Its called “encoding“ by academics. You need to understand what information is likely to end up in your long term memory when you study or sit through a powerpoint. Right?

Long term memory will be the process of what we’ll call “memory after.” It’s what happen when we try to recall a memory that is there, stored or encoded.

Now take a look at this graph coming from countless memory studies. This is the graph of recall against time during the process of learning. Its called a serial position curve.



This is the graph of recall against time during learning. What you remember along the timeline. It’s high in the beginning and high at the end. Not much else gets remembered except for a couple of things which we will come to in a moment.

Graphs like this come from many memory studies originally by Prussian philosopher/psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 and more recently by others such as Ben Murdock at the University of Toronto in 1962. The memory guinea pigs in the study are asked to remember as many words as they can— the words are read out at perhaps one second intervals. When the words have been read out the subjects are asked to write down as many as they can remember.

Primacy Effect

Notice that recall is high for the first few words. It’s just common sense that we remember firsts or beginnings. Psychology calls this the Primacy Effect.

So we remember beginnings. You can probably remember your first ride in a bicycle, your first day of school. I certainly can. First day of school – I mean can you remember your 273rd day at school? No-one in his right mind remembers his or her 273rd day at school!

So we remember beginnings.

Recency Effect

Now look at the other end of the graph. This zone is given a very sensible, practical name. Because we remember the most recent things. It’s common knowledge. It’s easy to remember what you had for supper last night. Can you remember supper last night? What about the night before that? And the night before that? So obviously it’s easier to remember things that are closer to you. We remember things that are recent. So this is called the Recency Effect.

So we tend to remember beginnings and we tend to remember ends of things…of a learning experience, of a lecture, of a video, of a reading a book.

Recall the first few minutes, the last few minutes. It’s just how the brain works.

Association

What about the kinks on the graph? That was where there were words being read out that were linked to personal experiences of the subjects in the experiment.

We remember by association. So we remember things that are linked by being personally relevant, interesting, that happen to connect with us. And repetition is a subset of this. If words are repeated we think “Oh there it is again, oh there it is again”.

Emphasis

If one of the words read by the experimenter was completely out of context, the memory graph also takes a jump. Say we were to read out a list of nonsense words, in amongst which was the word Muhammad Ali. Everybody remembers Muhammad Ali. Why do you remember Muhammad Ali? It’s a longer word, it’s double barrelled. Its completely out of context, a colourful character.

It’s emphasised by virtue of being different from the background. So its called outstandingness, or emphasis.

So now we have 4 key memory principles: we have primacy and recency, association and emphasis.

Emphasis deserves more… well, emphasis! There is a technical name for emphasis. It’s called the “Von Restorff Effect.”

Hedwig von Restorff was the Berlin psychiatrist/paediatrician who showed in 1933 that whenever something we see is unusual, or different, or set off from the background – that thing will tend to be remembered better than the boring old everything else.

Undergraduate student Frank Garcia  was able to show that the von Restorff Effect even improved the primacy on a 20 word list of words presented in powerpoint. He put a red word in at position 11. Other studies suggest that this improves recall on the entire experience.

So now you know what to do with your PowerPoints!

Unusual, traumatic events like the Boston Bombing get remembered. Can you remember where you were, when the news came through that Princess Diana had been driven into the tunnel in Paris, and sadly was carried out the other side. What time of the day was it when you heard the news? Most people can remember these dramatic events. It is sometimes called “flashbulb memory”.

As another example of the von Restorff effect, a well-known South African oil industry executive was giving his presentation in a prestige venue. He lit some fireworks and unfortunately their very thick smoke got detected and the sprinkler system soaked 500 people. So for 20 years he had people coming up to him and and saying “ah I remember the day … we got wet!”

So lets imagine you are sitting in a 1 hour presentation, or sitting and reading a textbook, or studying for an hour, or watching a movie for an hour. All other things being equal you’ll tend to remember the first couple of minutes, tend to remember the last couple of minutes, and not much else. Except that you’ll remember it if it’s personally relevant or hooked or connected in some way. Also, things that are deliberately dramatised or emphasised or unusual. Anything set off from the background, highlighted if you like, and not much else. This makes sense in terms of your own experience, does it not?

In summary: Experiments show that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list. This is known as the serial position effect, a term coined by Herman Ebbinghaus. The tendency to recall earlier words is called the primacy effect; the tendency to recall the later words is called the recency effect.

And the whole graph is elevated by having items that are associated or emphasised in there.

SO HERE ARE 7 PRACTICAL USES OF THE GRAPH OF MEMORY DURING LEARNING

1. PRESENTATIONS: your audience will remember the first few minutes, The last few minutes and anything you emphasise or that is personally relevant to them. So start with a very brief summary and end with a review.

2. SPEECHES: there is an old formula for giving a successful speech. It goes something like this: ‘Tell em what you’re going to tell em; tell em; and finally tell em what you told em.’ That way you have capitalised on primacy and recency. Plus you have used repetition – a subset of association.

3. TRAININGS: Use interaction. Recall we remember what is personally relevant. But you don’t know what is relevant for your audience unless you ask them questions. Then you hook your wonderful content onto their answers.

4. KEEP IT SHORT – TAKE BREAKS: the longer the time between the beginning and ending of your learning or delivery session, the lower the recall. Therefore, keep it short. Putting short breaks into your session that would otherwise run longer than an hour makes a profound difference to the amount recalled. This way you introduce more than one primacy and recency. It’s like chopping Nessie into several sections. Each one grows a new head and tail.

5. LET GO ON CLOSURE: Carrying on the idea above, keep working sessions short. End on time rather than at a natural break point. This is counter-intuitive but it triggers a thing called the Ziegarnik Effect, after Bluma Ziegarnik, a Soviet psychologist. In 1927 she showed waiters remembered incomplete orders better than completed ones.

David Straker on his brilliant site *** suggests that to remember things for examinations, take breaks when a module is not necessarily complete, i.e. on time. Then the ongoing thinking about the incomplete task helps keep important facts in mind. http://changingminds.org/explanations/memory/zeigarnik_effect.htm

6. REPORTS, BLOGS, ASSIGNMENTS: Start with an enticing preview, and end with a thorough summary.

7. DEMONSTRATIONS: Capitalise on association and emphasis with relevant jokes, stories, anecdotes, audience participation, question and answer sessions, repetition, chanting, visuals, pauses, and alliteration.

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MEMORY RESEARCH REFERENCES

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if you you want to do great things with your life.

Think about it. We were taught how to tie shoelaces as a kid – now we take it fore-granted. And is it not ridiculous that we know more about how to work a toaster – or iPad – than how to work our brain? And how do we learn quickly and effectively?

Dr Grace Saw decided to find out in Brisbane recently. Here she talks about what she discovered …

She talks about her experience learning how to do Mind Mapping and Power Learning.

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Right now have you a book that’s been gathering dust since you bought it before getting on the plane last year?

Try this:

1. Spend two minutes reading the dust cover and chapter contents.
2. Take a blank pice of paper and dump everything you ever knew about the topic without looking at the book again.
3. Grab a little post-it note pad and flick through the book for just four minutes – time it. DON’T read anything that looks interesting, but DO pause just long enough to put a post-it note on it. In other words, flag anything that looks worth returning to later.
4. Set yourself three study objectives – things you want to achieve with the book in the next hour.
5. Write a study plan for the next hour on a piece of paper – just list a start time, a stop time, a break time and when will you review what you gleaned in the hour.
6. Now start your study hour. First re-read the entire book in five minutes! Superficial? Yes! but just do it.
7. Now start all over again and read the book for the third time in the next 35 minutes. Pace yourself – this time focus on the first and last paragrapgh of each chapter – or, if the book is well-summarised – go read the summaries. Highlight about 60 keywords during this time.
8. Now STOP after the 35 minutes. Take a break for two minutes. Then make a mind map of what you highlighted. Take just 15 minutes for this. DONT cover any new material.
9. Finally, take five minutes to dive back into the most important lesson you gleaned in the time so far, and read it slowly. Update your mind map, and you’re done.

Try it. You’ll be amazed.

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Mind Maps are a great help with motivation. They get the ball rolling and keep you focussed. Mind mapping helps you organise your ideas during the process of goal setting and then helps keep them in front of you–so you achieve more.

Here’s how to weave mind mapping into your goal setting to boost your motivation and achievement.

Write Down your Feelings and Accomplishments – How do you feel about your accomplishments?  Mind map them. You will have a number of accomplishments in your life. Mapping keeps them visible and memorable.

Set Personal Goals – Having goals is more than important. Knowing what your goals are is even more crucial. Map those goals. It helps you with the process of goal setting.  It helps you follow them, because they are more memorable. As you track your progress, cross the old goals off one by one. You will feel a sense of accomplishment.

Know your Reasons – What is your reason for wanting to accomplish this goal? What exactly is on your mind? Mapping is a splendid way to unlock your inner reasons.

Take Breaks –  Doing this helps to reduce your level of stress, and it harnesses your inner creativity. Research shows that taking breaks actually SAVES time. It saves more time than it uses!

Mind maps are a great way to boost your motivation, get going with your goal setting and speed the achievement of your personal goals.

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So what is EQ? Actually my delegate meant EI, or emotional Intelligence, as discussed in a doctoral dissertation by William Payne in the 1980s and popularised by Daniel Goleman in the mid-90s.

EI has been defined as having to do with perceiving, understanding, managing and using the emotions. We know that the Amygdala is deeply involved in processing emotions.

IQ as you know has to do with the ability to solve the kind of problems that face a student or academic. We know this is what the neocortex is about.

IQ, proposed by psychologist William Stern in 1912, is generally measured with standardised IQ tests developed by Raven, Wechsler, Stanford,  Binet and others.

It has been used to predict scholastic achievement, job-performance and even income.

Did you know that the average IQ score from many countries has been rising at around 3 points per decade since the early 1900s? That’s about 33 points. See, we are getting cleverer. This is called the Flynn effect .

It has been believed that fluid intelligence generally declines of age while crystallised intelligence remains intact. This view has been challenged by recent studies on meditating subjects who demonstrated increases in fluid intelligence even in later life.

So are EI and IQ correlated?

Apparently not! Which surprised me. Part of the problem is that there are no standardised ways to measure EI.

But thinking about it, EI or EQ is a very different idea from IQ. One measures abilities related to academic performance and the other related to life skills. You may want to have a look at Andrew Weaver’s well reasoned post here.

Another useful link is here. The conclusion of this writer is that it depends how you measure EI. If you use self-report measures correlations with IQ are very low, while if you use ability-based measures the correlations are slightly higher.

My view is:  to hell with IQ, EQ is the thing that matters.

But to pass that exam leading to the higher qualification, you need IQ.

So here is a suggestion. Hook in to my free weekly newsletter to get tons of free stuff all designed to help you

• get your degree
• save time
• commit stuff to long term memory rather than cramming
• keep up
• rid yourself of the overwhelm you feel
• sort information overload.
  

Hey guys – pop a comment in just below – it is so appreciated! 

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• Learn new material quickly and effectively using mindmapping and power learning strategies
• Solve problems more creatively
• See the “big picture” – make better decisions
• Improve your critical thinking
• Remember names
• Concentrate while in meetings, presentations or during study
• Keep meetings focussed – for example during a strat planning session
• Make better presentations – better prepared and better delivered
• Improve idea generation, for example during a brainstorm
• Read faster
• Handle masses of information – in presentations, meetings or study.

“Excellent approach which has provided me with so much confidence in moving forward especially in my studies for masters.”    J.B., Perth

 

WHO WOULD LOVE IT

• Those who need to gather huge amounts of information, both verbal and written (e.g. training course material, legislation, product and system specifications, software manuals, etc).,
• Consultants, Managers and personnel undergoing training,
• those who are on registered learnerships,
• those who need better short term memory to remember key things and key people,
• officers whose jobs require a degree of problem solving, creativity, information memorisation and recall, or where they act as change agents. This includes
• staff of technology areas and other project environments,
• project staff and change agents in line administration areas,
• those identified for “fast track”,
• members of graduate programmes,
• systems analysts, business analysts, programmers, software specialists, systems programmers, analyst programmers, application programmers, project leaders, network consultants, support specialists,
• junior, middle and senior managers, section managers, and
• anyone doing any kind of thinking, brainstorming, or attending meetings or presentations.

It is not aimed directly at staff whose jobs are more routine, exercising the role of control and management of existing processes and procedures, unless their jobs specifically require:

• processing large amounts of written material and
• solving problems of a strategic or tactical nature,
• or where radical change requires that their job roles, attitudes to work priorities and thinking styles need to change substantially to cope with change.

Thinking Skills helps learners to see the big picture. It has a wonderful impact on morale. Therefore any groups whose individual learners need “opening up” would benefit.

“This will assist in implementing the right structures and disciplines to significantly grow my personal effectiveness both professionally and personally. Thank you Richard, I have already identified some of my team that I will be recommending this to. And I learnt to juggle!”    T.H.,  Australia

HOW  GET MORE INFO?

Email us at think@icon.co.za and we’ll do the rest

or call 011 483 0685

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What a great bunch. Thanks for a most enjoyable three days. And for the written feedback. Now lets have a few PhDs and MBAs. Seriously.

Its easy when you know how – just takes a fair amount of time.

But if learning becomes a hobby, it can be truly engrossing and fun.

And there is a different photo HERE. I’d love you to LIKE the PAGE. As you know Facebook gives you certain extra perks once you pass a threshold of 30 likes. So if you have a FB account please do like it.

I’ll be back on April 16-18, and again October 15-17, 2013, so you can let interested friends know.

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